


The Ordinary Woman and the Good Man

by Lisgreomg



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Study, Episode: s06e01 Exile on Main St., F/M, M/M, Season/Series 04
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-04
Updated: 2012-04-04
Packaged: 2017-11-03 01:02:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/375339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lisgreomg/pseuds/Lisgreomg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I wrote this post Exile on Main Street, because I couldn't stop thinking about Lisa, and what she must have thought each time Dean showed up at her door.</p><p>A Lisa Braeden character study.</p><p>Note - I haven't yet watched any of season 7 or anything past 6.03 so if there was any updated information about Lisa it won't be included in this. Sorry!</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ordinary Woman and the Good Man

**Author's Note:**

> So after I watched Exile on Main Street (forever and a day ago) I had all these Lisa feels, the woman who invited her weekend stand to spend forever in her house with her son. I honestly have nothing but respect for Lisa.
> 
> This is finally them in fic format.
> 
> The Dean/Cas is barely even there, this is Lisa's story.

She’s known Dean Winchester a total of four days when he shows up on her porch sounding like he’s eating his last meal in a couple hours.

The thing is, even in those four days she’s recognized enough of his soul to know that he’s something special.

Even before he saved her son, that crazy weekend of sex and fun and _laughing_ and she’d remembered enough about his smile to recognize him years later, in a totally different city. And it’s not like she was a slut (okay, maybe a little) but there were more than a few guys back then, and while she doesn’t actively regret that time in her life, she’s still not totally proud of it, she’s not ashamed to admit that she wouldn’t remember all of her weekend stands if they showed up at her door eight years later.

Then the second weekend, terror and a creeping feeling down her spine, and Dean, sadder than she remembers, looking at Ben like he’s a dream he would have never allowed himself to have, and that combined with the creeping feeling, and maybe she overreacts a little.

And then monsters are real and Dean saves Ben and just as fast he’s gone again.

They move, of course they move, she can’t stay in this house now, and Ben’s a little terrified of the basement, which she can’t blame him for.

Dean finds them again, almost two and a half years later. He stands on the porch looking terrified and broken in a way that rips at her. She knows with utter certainty at the very core of herself that Dean is a Good Man. The kind you read about, the hero that would never call himself a hero.

It breaks her heart a little that he doesn’t have anyone else to say goodbye to but a woman he’s known for four days and a kid he knew for two.

Then it’s less than a week later and he comes back. And she’d thought - stupidly, oh so stupidly - that he’d been broken before. Now, he looks destroyed, like someone has ripped out whole chucks of him and ground those pieces into dirt. Like he’ll never be whole again.

She gets the story from him in bits and pieces. She suspects it’s highly edited, but also knows there are things about his world that she’d never understand, even if he was capable of explaining.

 It’s a shock, sharp and piercing to realize that the world was so close to the end and no one knew. She has a second that she’s not proud of where she _hopes_ that Dean’s actually just crazy, and that none of this is real. But no, she can see the truth of it in his eyes, in the way he doesn’t sleep, sacked out on the couch, he’ll sleep for no more than fifteen minutes at a time, until he’s up and moving again, shaking a little more every time.

Lisa’s father had been in the Marines. She’d grown up a Marine brat, and maybe that’s an excuse, both for her horrid taste in men and the way she connects with Dean. There’s something intimately familiar about the way he carries himself, that dead light in his eye. She’s met more than enough vets to know what one looks like, and Dean’s war might not have a name (it does though, and he says the word Apocalypse with terrifying familiarity) or much of a budget, but it left the same look in his eyes, and she could never repute her blood enough to ignore that silent scream.

At first, when Dean shows up, she thinks it’ll just be a few days, and she’s more than willing to offer shelter for those few days. The weekend stretches into a month, into two, and she realizes suddenly that he has _nowhere else_. It’s shocking and heartbreaking and _horrible_ to her, that this hero, this Good Man, has nowhere else to go, nowhere where it wouldn’t be even more painful for him. Where he wouldn’t be reminded of the people he lost even more then he already is.

The night she realizes this is the night she takes him into her bed the first time. After that he doesn’t leave. He’s a shitty sleeper, tossing and turning, getting up two or three or four times a night, and she’d be shocked if he was getting more than four hours of sleep a night. Every once in a long while though, he’ll fall asleep, toss and turn then abruptly stop, breathe out a sound, which she thinks could be ‘cast’ but he never gets to the t, and falls deep asleep. Those are the rare nights that he sleeps for longer than six hours. She doesn’t ask, because while Dean may be a Good Man, she’s just a regular woman, and she doesn’t feel she has the strength to know everything, even if he had the strength to tell it.


End file.
